The radio environment in a wireless sensor network is time varying and difficult to predict which increases the risk of depending on a single frequency channel for communication, especially in a harsh industrial environment. For this reason, standard protocols used in the Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT), e.g., WirelessHART and IEEE 802.15.4-2015 timeslotted channel hopping (TSCH), employ channel hopping across different radio frequency channels to mitigate the effects of communication impairments such as narrow band interference and multipath fading.
In general, channel hopping relies on time synchronization to ensure that a transmitting node and the receiving node operate on the same frequency channel. One variant of channel hopping that is commonly used relies on blacklisting of unreliable channels based on node statistics. In this variant, channel hopping is performed using the non-blacklisted channels, referred to as the whitelist.